You can read the post here or the original substack post here.

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We simply tried to do our jobs like always, even in the face of increasing resistance from a system that did not want to treat the president’s son the same as any other taxpayer.

The foundation of our tax system requires that everyone be treated equally.

Telling the truth about that to our leadership at the IRS, to internal agency watchdogs, and eventually to Congress is our sworn duty — not just something we are allowed to do, but something we must do.

In theory, the law encourages agents like us to report misconduct by promising that we will be protected from retaliation for making those disclosures.

But in practice, the system has reacted instinctively to protect itself instead…

For the full op-ed, click here.

The post Shapley and Ziegler: We blew whistle on Hunter Biden case — now we’re fighting for truth appeared first on Empower Oversight.

Last week, the Justice Department finally charged three men with murdering infamous Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger in 2018. He was in federal custody at the time of his death. The circumstances, including the delay in charging anyone for the crime, raise a host of questions. The FBI’s long, sordid history with Bulger and his family’s lawsuit against the government for its failure to protect him have also raised suspicions about the government’s official story.

But, that’s nothing new when it comes to Bulger and the FBI. It’s a well-documented stain on the FBI’s history that its Boston office used and protected murderers like Bulger as informants for decades, tolerating and turning a blind eye to their crimes.

Following the unprecedented FBI raid of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Vice President Harris said she had “full confidence that the Department of Justice will do what the facts and the law requires.”

Why? Nearly half the country is much more skeptical, and with good reason.

Obviously, the FBI’s recent history of mishandling controversial investigations into Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has undermined public trust and polarized views of the Bureau along political lines. And despite the inadequate protections for FBI whistleblowers, several are now risking their careers to report systemic political bias to Congress.

But problems at the Bureau extend far beyond entanglements in partisan disputes. The FBI’s failures in the case of USA Gymnastics physician and convicted child molester Lawrence Nassar rightly led to outrage across the political spectrum.

Unfortunately, these are just the latest in a long line of serious problems — from falsely targeting an innocent man in the 2001 Anthrax attacks (putting taxpayers on the hook for a $5.9 million settlement) to the FBI crime lab scandal of the 1990s to the corrupt Boston office relationship with Bulger to the dark days of J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover directed the FBI and its predecessor agency from 1924 until his death in 1972. His personality and leadership style are imprinted on the organization’s DNA in countless ways. Its traditions, practices, and culture are still influenced by his legacy.

Hoover was a master bureaucratic infighter who relentlessly amassed power and ruthlessly abused it for nearly fifty years. He is the reason there is a 10-year term limit on FBI directors today. Presidents feared him. He kept secret blackmail files, lied to Congress, illegally surveilled his enemies, and leaked phony stories to the press to manipulate public opinion. But, don’t take my word for it. Instead, take the time to read Betty Medsger’s fascinating book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.” It meticulously details the history of FBI abuses and how a group of activists broke into an FBI office and stole the documents to expose those abuses.

In 2022, it is astonishing that the name of the FBI headquarters building still honors the man whose COINTELPRO operation illegally spied on Martin Luther King, Jr. and tried to intimidate him into committing suicide.

This history is not offered as an indictment of the FBI as a whole. Most FBI employees today are dedicated, patriotic, hardworking public servants. We should honor and respect their service. But doing so does not mean we should ignore the organization’s fundamental flaws throughout its history and today.

Asking tough questions is meant to help improve the FBI. It needs to purge its culture of Hoover’s influence by learning to welcome independent scrutiny. Oversight can be an opportunity to earn back the public trust that has eroded since Hoover’s abuses were exposed and all the missteps that followed.

Empower Oversight, the whistleblower and government oversight organization I founded last year, recently received a tip that while Whitey Bulger was one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives, the Bureau ignored a lead based on physical evidence reported by a local homicide detective. The detective worked in the area where Bulger was hiding and was later arrested, but for some reason, the FBI never followed up on the lead.

Just before the press reported Bulger’s killers had been charged, Empower Oversight filed two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, one with the FBI and one with the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (DOJ-OIG), seeking records related to the homicide detective’s tip to the FBI. The tip involved a firearm that was allegedly connected to Bulger.

According to Sergeant Gary M. Steiner of the City of Santa Monica Police Department, he witnessed the attempted sale of a firearm with the serial numbers removed and reportedly belonging to a former bodyguard for Bulger. Although Sergeant Steiner took action to document the incident and ensure that local authorities seized the firearm, the FBI seemed uninterested in finding out whether it was used in any crimes or could lead to locating and apprehending Bulger.

That’s just weird. Why wouldn’t the FBI be all over a promising lead like that?

Following Bulger’s arrest years later, the FBI denied to Sergeant Steiner that it had any record of his contacts and again refused to obtain or examine the firearm. In an unsigned letter, the DOJ-OIG refused to open an inquiry into the issues that Sergeant Steiner raised.

Answering tough questions when cases like this that raise public suspicions about the Bureau would be a step toward the type of transparency that begins to re-build public trust. The FBI is an organization desperately in need of fundamental, transformative change if it is to have any hope of managing the current crisis of confidence. Restoring faith in its integrity would require bold action to publicly break with the abuses of its past.

The FBI needs leadership that is strong enough to embrace a radical new era of reform and accountability. Rather than hiding behind the heroism and dedication of rank-and-file FBI agents to dodge tough questions, the FBI needs leadership confident enough to work with independent oversight authorities to expose serious misconduct, correct it, and impose actual consequences on senior officials.

As with all government agencies, the FBI tries to avoid scrutiny and cover up its failures. But its long history of abuse, immense power, and unique ability to resist independent oversight makes its attacks on those who question it even more disturbing. The media and the American public should not be fooled and elected representatives should not be intimidated. They need to hold the FBI accountable and demand transparency.

The post The FBI Should Apologize For Its Crooked Past And Focus On Accountability For The Future appeared first on Empower Oversight.

Last November my organization, Empower Oversight, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around half a dozen other entities have also been forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents public.

It’s worth noting that this didn’t need to happen. Good lawyers charge hundreds of dollars an hour or more and hiring legal talent to pursue cases full time is not easy. By forcing public interest groups to spend this money on litigation before complying with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the NIH is locking out the vast majority of Americans from accessing federal records. It takes financial resources to most effectively probe how our government operates.

Only after suing NIH did we receive any documents. In March, we released hundreds of emails in a report about the NIH deleting the sequences of viruses from a database they operate. These viruses are closely related to the COVID-19 virus. Experts say that analyzing them may help us understand how the pandemic began.

Four email exchanges stood out. First, emails show that the NIH appears to have misled reporters about why those sequences were deleted from public view and steered journalists away from a New York Times story, toward more favorable coverage in the Washington Post.

Second, NIH officials told the public that the pandemic most likely began when an infected animal sickened a human in a market in Wuhan, China. But we found an email with prominent scientists advising NIH that the sequences at the heart of the controversy suggested that explanation was less likely.

Third, we found that NIH Director Francis Collins was reviewing and clearing FOIA requests from reporters, an odd use of time by the director of a public health agency in the midst of a pandemic.

Fourth, a virologist asked the NIH to analyze the deleted sequences of viruses closely related to COVID-19, of which it retains copies for “preservation purposes.” But the NIH refused to cooperate. A few days after we released our report, Vanity Fair confirmed and expanded on our findings. It reported on many of the same emails we released, including several describing a Sunday afternoon Zoom call with outside experts, Collins and Anthony Fauci—the NIH official most prominently associated our country’s pandemic response. The weekend Zoom call came just as information about NIH’s removal of sequences at the request of a Wuhan researcher was about to become public.

In the last 18 months, two news organizations have taken the NIH to court, where judges forced the agency to release public documents. In early June, Buzzfeed published emails sent and received by Dr. Fauci, who is now chief medical adviser to the president. The public has a right to understand how the government handled a pandemic that has killed so many Americans, but the agency only made the documents public after Buzzfeed sued.

The same thing happened again with The Intercept, a fiercely independent news site which has published blockbuster stories in recent months about the NIH’s funding of research by the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that collaborates with and funds the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Last September, The Intercept published 900 pages of internal NIH documents related to U.S. government financing of research at the WIV. Among those hundreds of pages, the reporters found new evidence that the NIH was funding research many scientists describe as “gain of function,” a type of study that involves making viruses more dangerous.

The NIH has denied that federal monies were used for gain-of-function research at the WIV that could have led to the pandemic, but Vanity Fair reported in October that the agency was forced to admit it had funded the risky research. A week afterward, The Intercept published even more NIH emails, this time showing that the EcoHealth Alliance had helped to craft the very language that governed the gain-of-function research that the NIH funds and is supposed to regulate. But none of this would have come to light if The Intercept had not taken the NIH to court to force the agency to comply with public information requests.

These two news sites are not alone.

Both liberal organizations—such as the Center for Food Safety—and conservative groups—such as Judicial Watch—have had to sue the NIH to understand its funding for gain-of-function studies. Meanwhile, other public interest groups such as Knowledge Ecology International and Public Citizen have sued the NIH to uncover its role in developing COVID-19 pharmaceutical therapies. These requests are important because taxpayers helped subsidize vaccines for which we are now paying top dollar.

Even when the NIH does respond to FOIA requests, it does not always disclose much. In the article about Dr. Fauci’s emails, Buzzfeed reported this summer that the documents the agency released were “just a portion of what was requested, and they are filled with redactions, making them an incomplete record of the time period and Fauci’s correspondence.”

In one example, the NIH redacted part of an email citing exemption B7, which is an exemption for “law enforcement purposes.” However, when senators on an investigative committee requested similar records from the agency, that same passage of the email was unredacted, exposing what the agency exempted for “law enforcement purposes.” In the email, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance told Fauci about the “work we’ve been doing in collaboration with Chinese virologists.”

Upset that the NIH was using exemptions to hide embarrassing information, senators pointed out that the paragraph does not appear to contain any information that “could reasonably be expected to interfere with [law] enforcement proceedings.”

In fact, a small nonprofit called U.S. Right to Know hired an attorney to sue the NIH for withholding documents by citing law enforcement purposes. “We want to know whether the US or Chinese governments, or scientists affiliated with them, are concealing data about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, or the risks of biosafety labs and gain-of-function research,” the group announced when filing its lawsuit.

We all pay extra when anyone sues the government. The process sucks up court time and expenses, and forces lawyers at the Department of Justice to get involved and collect agency documents. It would all be cheaper and faster if the NIH simply followed the law in the first place.

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined how much it costs taxpayers when an agency ignores a FOIA demand, forces litigation, loses and has to pay the plaintiff’s attorneys fees in addition to its own lawyers’ time spent fighting the litigation. GAO found that the data is not tracked well enough to provide a definitive answer, but with the taxpayer potentially on the hook for both sides of the court battles, the cost adds up fast. In one subset of agencies and lawsuits with enough data to track, GAO found that for 57 lawsuits which the government lost, taxpayers paid $1.3 million between 2009 and 2014.

In short, we are all losing. Americans pay far too much to force agencies like the NIH to be transparent. Holding them accountable through litigation remains hard, but important work.

Jason Foster is the founder and president of Empower Oversight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization dedicated to enhancing independent oversight of government and corporate wrongdoing. Foster was previously chief investigative counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and spent 22 years as a congressional investigator.

The post Jason Foster: The Public’s Business Ought to be Public appeared first on Empower Oversight.

Healthy financial markets need clarity and transparency to function properly. Financial regulators are supposed write clear rules so that markets can operate on a level playing field. Instead, they sometimes make arbitrary enforcement decisions that look unfair and undermine public confidence in their integrity.

Among the safeguards against the kind of government overreach that distorts markets and hinders innovation, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a vital tool for Americans to enforce transparency and accountability on the government—but it takes a lot of persistence to make FOIA work the way it should.

Here’s an example to illustrate my point.

In August 2021, Empower Oversight, a nonprofit public integrity group that I founded last year, filed requests under FOIA with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking documents related to three SEC officials and alleged conflicts of interest.  For seven months, the SEC has delayed and stonewalled, failing to cough up a single page. It has taken two administrative appeals and a federal lawsuit to get the agency to even admit that it has the documents we are seeking.  At first, it issued a letter claiming that no such records could be found, which turned out to be false.

What is this controversy about and why should you care? 

Developers and users of digital currencies have sharply criticized the SEC for its failure to enact clear rules for digital tokens while taking selective and inconsistent enforcement actions. Whether these digital assets, known as cryptocurrencies, should be treated as “securities” that are subject to the SEC’s jurisdiction, or as “commodities,” which like traditional currencies fall outside of its jurisdiction, is a controversial and unresolved question.

Rather than adopting clear rules based on neutral principles to guide innovators, investors, and regulators in the crypto space, critics say that the SEC has instead arbitrarily tried to enforce securities regulations against developers of some digital currencies while allowing others to operate unmolested.  Critics also point to an appearance that conflicts of interest may have tainted these SEC enforcement decisions.

Empower Oversight’s FOIA requests are aimed at learning whether any SEC documents might support the widespread claims of apparent conflicts that are undermining public confidence in the SEC’s neutrality and objectivity.

Specifically, three former SEC officials had a direct hand in crypto enforcement actions that moved the markets: former Chairman Jay Clayton, former Director of Corporation Finance William Hinman, and former Director of Enforcement Marc Berger. The fact that all three have personal financial ties to entities that benefited from the SEC’s enforcement priorities has naturally raised suspicions—particularly among holders of the digital assets impacted directly by the SEC’s actions.

Was the SEC aware of these financial ties, and what, if anything, did it do to mitigate the appearance of conflicts of interest? Did any of these men communicate while inside the SEC with those who paid them before, during or after they were involved in these enforcement actions? These are some of the key questions that the SEC needs to address in order to restore public faith in its integrity.

Why have so many lost faith in the SEC’s objectivity?

On the last day of Clayton’s term as SEC Chairman, Berger’s division filed a lawsuit against the crypto industry giant Ripple Labs. The SEC alleged that the token XRP has been an unregistered security since its inception and that all of its sales since 2013 had violated section 5 of the Securities Act. At the time of the enforcement action, XRP was the third largest cryptocurrency on the global market behind Bitcoin and Ether. The December 2020 lawsuit immediately crashed XRP’s trading price on exchanges which then delisted the token out of fear of further SEC retaliation.

The SEC’s action essentially wiped out $15 billion in value for tens of thousands of retail holders around the world. That didn’t exactly further the SEC’s official mission of protecting investors.

Adding insult to injury, the SEC unsuccessfully opposed allowing those holders of the token to file amicus briefs in the case. 

Immediately after filing the Ripple lawsuit, Clayton and Berger left the SEC to work for companies that have financial interests in promoting Bitcoin and Ether, the two leading competitor digital currencies to XRP. 

Clayton returned to the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, where he’d made his fortune before his SEC service and where one of its clients, ConsenSys, is a direct competitor to Ripple. Clayton also joined the advisory council for cryptocurrency hedge fund One River Asset Management, which had consolidated a $1 billion investment in Bitcoin and Ether shortly before Clayton’s agency filed the Ripple lawsuit. 

For his part, Berger joined the Wall Street firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, which is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a coalition built by ConsenSys to promote and market Ether. Hinman’s ties to Simpson Thacher, to which he returned after leaving the SEC, were much deeper. He’d been a partner at the firm before joining the government, and during his tenure at the SEC, Hinman received more than $15 million in payments from the Ethereum-linked firm.

Perhaps the most glaring questions arise from a high-profile speech that Hinman gave in 2018 where he declared that “putting aside the fundraising that accompanied the creation of Ether,” the token was not a security, and its sales were not securities transactions. Ether’s market value subsequently rose by more than 600%. Evidence made public in the Ripple case reveals that Hinman met with ConsenSys on multiple occasions before giving the speech, as well as a group of lawyers organized by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz to present a “safe harbor” regulatory white paper that exclusively mentioned Ether. 

Three months before the Ripple lawsuit was filed, Clayton’s firm Sullivan & Cromwell assisted ConsenSys in its acquisition of the Quorum platform, designed to directly challenge Ripple’s cross-border payments business. And in addition to returning to Simpson Thacher days after the Ripple case was filed, Hinman became an advisory partner to Andreessen Horowitz’s multi-billion dollar crypto investment fund.

With all of this evidence raising questions about the objectivity of the SEC’s enforcement agenda, critics are pointing to Clayton, Hinman, and Berger as the latest examples of the classic “revolving door” between regulatory agencies and the companies they regulate.

This is understandably frustrating to citizens who are fed up by a lack of transparency in how enforcement actions are taken and a lack of oversight by agency ethics offices that are often toothless and by Congress, which is the last resort for Americans who want meaningful oversight of the regulators by its elected representatives.

The SEC has yet to answer Empower Oversight’s FOIA lawsuit. We had asked for communications between Clayton, Hinman, and Berger and those outside the SEC with a financial interest in the SEC’s enforcement decisions.  At first the SEC claimed it could not find any. But, following our appeals and questions about how the searches were done, the agency recently admitted that around a 1,000 pages of communications between Mr. Hinman and Simpson Thatcher turned up after all.

As of this writing, though, the SEC has still failed to turn over any of those pages.

Today, February 11, 2022, was the deadline for the SEC to answer our lawsuit in court. On Thursday, February 10, we agreed to a one-week extension—on condition that the SEC provide the documents it has already located. We are also sending the SEC some additional search terms to inform the additional searches it agreed to conduct.

Empower Oversight expects the full measure of legally required transparency from the SEC, and we will continue to press the SEC to find and produce the documents it is required by law to disclose to the public.

Cases like this are why FOIA is so crucial to our democracy and why transparency throughout government is critical to keeping its power in check.

But it sure ain’t easy.

Jason Foster is the founder and president of Empower Oversight. He was previously chief investigative counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Empower Oversight works for public integrity and accountability thanks to the help of courageous whistleblowers and generous donors who help fund our research and litigation. If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution, please click here. We sincerely appreciate anything you can give to support our work. 

The post Shining a Light on Would-be Cryptocurrency Regulators appeared first on Empower Oversight.

Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) finally admitted that it funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Worse, it also failed to adequately monitor its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance. The NIH letter containing these admissions should have come much sooner and in response to serious bipartisan oversight from Congress.  Instead, the NIH reply came in response to inquiries from the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

Democrats have refused to investigate funding for EcoHealth, citing fears that such questions might, “deflect accountability for the Trump Administration’s failed response to this crisis.” Since Democrats control both the House and the Senate, congressional requests do not come with the signature of a committee chair. This allows agencies to more easily ignore Congress without fear of consequence.

Two months ago, the Biden administration released an unclassified two-page report that came to no conclusion on the origins of COVID19, and the White House pledged no rest in efforts to understand how the pandemic began. “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again,” President Biden said.

But are they? Not really.

Since then, Director Francis Collins of the NIH has announced he is leaving as the agency continues to defy congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests for documents.  And David Morens, a senior advisor to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), quickly threw cold water on Biden’s pledge, arguing to National Geographic that “at some point, it crosses over from doing due diligence to wasting time and being crazy. We may have seen that point already.”

To this day, the White House has done little to discover how the pandemic started, and Democrats in control of Congress have have fallen in line and failed to ask hard questions.

From early 2020, Anthony Fauci and allied virologists have worked hard to shut down inquiries, especially any investigation that examines whether the virus leaked from a lab accident in Wuhan, China. Recent NIH documents made public explain why. For several years, Fauci’s NIAID funded dangerous gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute. 

If it were ever definitively proven that Fauci’s grants for virus research helped start the pandemic, that would likely end his career along with funding for virologists who do gain-of-function studies.  No one has seriously alleged the grants directly led to the pandemic, but Fauci still aggressively wagged his finger at questions that even hint at the possibility of that risk. He huffed and puffed that he “resents” the implication. But, stonewalling instead of simply embracing transparency only raises more questions.

At Empower Oversight, we recently sent Members of Congress a briefing document that outlines their powers to investigate the origins of this pandemic and urges them to put partisan differences aside for the sake of more than 741,000 Americans killed by the virus.

The President is correct when he says that cooperation from China would be helpful. But plenty of questions about funding for gain-of-function research in Wuhan remain unanswered here at home.

Fauci’s NIAID funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. And, Daszak’s relationship with the Wuhan lab is so problematic in the scientific community, that a task force run by the medical journal Lancet shut down because of its ties to EcoHealth.

If the medical community is alarmed about these financial ties to Wuhan, why isn’t Congress?

Besides receiving millions of dollars in research grants, EcoHealth has also received $1.5 million in coronavirus loans from the Small Business Administration. Federal dollars should come with federal scrutiny and enforced transparency.

Congress could empower and task any one of several independent entities to investigate taxpayer funds provided to Daszak and EcoHealth, including the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, and the Congressional Oversight Commission. Any of the three could examine loans and NIH grants to EcoHealth using existing resources and expertise.

The legislative branch should also pursue answers through its own oversight committees. Members must put their constitutional obligations ahead of partisan loyalties—not pull punches merely because the current majority in Congress is of the same political party as the administration.

In 2017, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and fought with a Republican White House for the right of Democrats serving as Ranking Members to get answers. He even held up one of his own party’s nominees until the White House acquiesced with a policy that required agencies make their “best efforts” to reply to requests from the members of the minority party in Congress.

It is unclear whether the Biden administration has officially rescinded that policy. But NIH’s failure to provide documents to Republican Ranking Members looks more like an attempt to protect Dr. Fauci, Mr. Daszak, and EcoHealth from scrutiny than “best efforts” to be transparent with the American public and its elected representatives.

Partisan bickering and gamesmanship are a disservice to average Americans who care much more about getting to the bottom of how the pandemic started and preventing the next one.

Congress has a constitutional obligation to understand why so many died.

This virus knows no political party, and Americans of every political and ideological background deserve answers to these important questions. Their elected representatives have the authority, and the duty, to get those answers.

Jason Foster is Founder & President of Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research, and former Chief Investigative Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The post Jason Foster: The Pandemic is not a Partisan Game appeared first on Empower Oversight.

Whistleblowers—and the truths they tell—far too often become the first casualties in the clash of bigger forces with other agendas. People tend to oversimplify complex stories to fit their preferred political narrative or to protect their own interests.

If the facts do not fit neatly into a convenient set of preconceptions, too often they are ignored, dismissed, or twisted to cater to well-known biases. This tactic is common among those who are the subject of whistleblower disclosures. They often attempt to change the subject to avoid accountability by pointing a finger at the whistleblower, even if they don’t know who it is.

It’s probably just a “disgruntled employee” who has “an axe to grind.” The implication is that there is no need to look into it. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I’ve seen this pattern countless times over the years. The most recent example occurred at the Veterans Affairs Department (VA) and was uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Empower Oversight. The request is related to the VA’s stonewalling of Senator Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) attempts to investigate allegations of ethical conflicts, improper gifts, and potential insider trading enabled by the VA. Empower Oversight also published a 19-page report detailing the controversy.

The VA has a long record of mistreating whistleblowers that spans multiple administrations. It seems to have a particularly deep-seated culture of retaliation and ethical conflicts. As Jacqueline Garrick, founder of Whistleblowers of America testified on Capitol Hill, “Employees risk their careers to protect veterans while senior VA officials travel to Europe, attend NASCAR events and curry favor with contractors at taxpayer expense.”

That culture was again on display among the 579 pages of documents the VA recently produced through FOIA.

The documents reveal the VA’s internal reactions to Senator Grassley’s oversight letters—which it has refused to answer since April of this year. In response to whistleblower disclosures, he has been asking about the lax culture of ethics at the VA that allowed its leadership to look the other way for years while a VA official named Charmain Bogue allegedly failed to recuse herself from matters related to her husband’s work.

Barrett Bogue ran an outside consulting firm that did work for those trying to influence his wife, Charmain. Among others, Veterans Education Success (VES), a nonprofit run by former Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) staffer Carrie Wofford, paid Barrett Bogue while advocating that his wife’s agency take enforcement actions to exclude certain schools from GI Bill benefits.

Some of the schools were operated by publicly traded companies, making information about any enforcement action potentially valuable to traders on Wall Street. Before the VA’s public announcement that it would act, a FOIA lawsuit has alleged that the VA leaked the news to a select few allies, including Wofford and VES.

Upon being asked by the Senator about these issues, to their credit and in contrast to Charmain Bogue, it appears from the new FOIA documents that two VA officials decided to recuse themselves from working on a reply because of ties to Barrett Bogue—ties much less significant than marriage.

The documents also reveal that one senior VA official named in Senator Grassley’s letter attacked a former VA employee in the process of defending himself. Acting Undersecretary of Benefits Thomas Murphy was named in the letter as having been one of three senior officials reportedly recommended for suspension for improperly accepting gifts from stakeholders.

Shortly after reviewing the Grassley letter, Murphy fired off an email to VA Secretary Denis R. McDonough. Murphy had immediately assumed, without evidence, that a former VA employee was a source of the protected disclosures that led to his proposed suspension and the protected disclosures to Congress that led to Senator Grassley’s letter.

Remarkably, Murphy takes credit in the email for firing the employee following the disclosures that led to his own proposed suspension: “The allegations Senator Grassley mentions here are part of a long list of allegations levied by a fired former employee that [sic] claimed to be a whistleblower. I terminated her for multiple violations of VA policies.”

Murphy also blamed “the last administration” for failing to deal with the Bogue conflict issues, even though Murphy himself was Bogue’s ultimate boss at the time—and still is.

Secretary McDonough then asked his Chief of Staff to draft a reply to Murphy’s note. The initial draft, although entirely redacted in the copy produced by the VA, was apparently strongly worded. Secretary McDonough replied: “I will use this language as my reply to Tom [Murphy]. It is stark, but I trust you have given this close consideration.”

McDonough’s reply apparently prompted McDonough’s Chief of Staff to dial it back. She sent a revised version and wrote: “Is this softer while still getting the point across?”

Later in the documents, we found an unredacted version of the message the VA Secretary ultimately sent to Murphy. Does he chastise Murphy for attacking a whistleblower Murphy had already fired? Does he ask any probing questions to find out whether the firing Murphy took credit for was, in fact, retaliation for disclosures that he believed led to his own proposed suspension for improperly accepting gifts?

No.

Instead, Secretary McDonough asked Murphy to “sit this one out,” instructed him to coordinate all communications through a designated contact, and warned him, “don’t discuss this matter with your subordinates.”

That was April 8, 2021. Six months later, the VA still hasn’t responded to oversight authorities in the Senate. The VA Inspector General is investigating the Bogue conflict issues, and law enforcement authorities may be investigating to determine whether there was any illicit trading ahead of the announcement mentioning publicly traded companies.

It’s a sordid, complicated mess that could use more sunlight and oversight to sort out properly. And, the whistleblowers who have tried to improve the VA with their disclosures should be applauded—not attacked as a diversion to avoid accountability.

The VA is reviewing thousands more emails in response to Empower Oversight’s FOIA request. Secretary McDonough should take charge and do the right thing. Take a hard line against retaliators, embrace transparency, and release the rest of the documents.

The post Jason Foster: Newly Uncovered Documents Show Senior VA Officials Smearing a Whistleblower to Avoid Congressional Oversight appeared first on Empower Oversight.

The recent spats between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about how the coronavirus pandemic started made for good television. The head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wagged his finger at a United States senator and called him a liar. Dr. Fauci rejected the premise of tough, evidence-based questions about our government’s support of risky “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on his watch.

While everyone in Washington loves a good debate, we need less finger wagging and more facts.

The public deserves access to documents from both the Chinese government and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Communist China’s secrecy is to be expected, of course, but the U.S. government ought to be more transparent and stop hiding what it knows about the virus research in Wuhan.

Public health experts agree that to stop the next pandemic, we must find out how the COVID-19 virus—which has killed more than 4 million people worldwide and 600,000 Americans—began in China. Some argue the pandemic started because of a natural virus spillover from bats or other animals to humans, while others posit that it could have started through a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, where scientists have been collecting and studying similar viruses for years.

Members of both the House and Senate have sent multiple requests to the NIH demanding to see documents about the money American taxpayers provided to the virus lab in Wuhan, and to view reports that explain specifics about this research. By refusing to release these documents, Dr. Fauci and other NIH officials have made it impossible to learn what the NIH has funded, and what it knows about research at Wuhan.

House members recently sent the NIH a second letter, demanding transparency on documents requested months ago about funding and reports of this research at the WIV. Meanwhile, the Washington Post editorial board reiterated its call for transparency on the WIV’s risky gain-of-function research.

In a recent editorial, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs laid out what we know: the NIH funded U.S. and Chinese scientists to collect SARS viruses and study them at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As Dr. Sachs explained, this research “included the creation of chimeric genetic recombinants of SARS-like viruses to study their capacity to infect human cells and to cause disease.” In short, American taxpayers funded research at the WIV that many scientists call “gain of function,” meaning it can increase the ability of an animal virus to infect and harm humans. Dr. Sachs leads a commission by a medical journal called The Lancet to investigate how the pandemic began.

Last year, Newsweek reported that Dr. Fauci provided grant money that ended up supporting risky research at the WIV. In March, the Washington Post called for an independent investigation into how the pandemic started, pointing out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had done gain-of-function experiments and had been working on viruses very similar to COVID-19. And last April, Politico reported that former acting CIA director Michael Morell noted that if the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, the U.S. would shoulder some of the blame since it funded research at that lab through government grants from 2014 to 2019.

The NIH released thousands of pages of internal documents that the Washington Post and Buzzfeed sought through the Freedom of Information Act. But the agency heavily redacted these documents, as the government often does to hide embarrassing details.

Yet NIH director Francis Collins is on record demanding transparency from others. “I do think we should be calling on China to make an expert-driven transparent investigation possible, because there are way too many unanswered questions,” he told the Washington Post. Dr. Collins also told the Post that the Wuhan researchers need to open their lab notebooks to be examined by outside experts. “If they really want to be exonerated from this claim of culpability, then they have got to be transparent.”

Agreed, but the NIH should be transparent too. How can Dr. Collins demand that researchers in Wuhan open their lab notebooks when the institute he leads will not do the same? Does Collins think that the public is not smart enough to see this hypocrisy?

“It is in fact common knowledge in the US scientific community that NIH has indeed supported genetic recombinant research on SARS-like viruses that many scientists describe as [gain of function research],” wrote Dr. Sachs in his recent editorial. He added that the process for oversight of this research is weak, limiting access for outside experts to inspect virus labs, review safety reports and scrutinize funding approvals.

“All laboratory notebooks and other relevant information should be opened by the Chinese and U.S. scientists working on this project for detailed scrutiny by independent experts,” Dr. Sachs wrote.

To get to the bottom of how this pandemic—which has demolished economies and destroyed millions of lives—began, we cannot rely on half measures and debates driven by politics rather than facts.

Americans funded research in Wuhan. We have a right to know what we paid for and whether it went horribly wrong. The Chinese government needs to be more transparent and cooperate with world leaders to get to the bottom of what happened in those labs. And Americans need to hold our own government accountable to an even higher standard of transparency.

Jason Foster is Founder & President of Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research, and former Chief Investigative Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The post Jason Foster: It’s Time For NIH Transparency On Wuhan Research Funding | Opinion appeared first on Empower Oversight.

Holding leaders accountable is an American tradition worth preserving, and applauding lawlessness undermines that tradition.

July 29, 2021

By: Dan Meyer and Jason Foster

Two hundred and forty-three years ago, on July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress passed the world’s first whistleblower law. As that anniversary is commemorated on National Whistleblower Appreciation Day this Friday, it is important to remember the story of America’s first whistleblowers, which led to that law. They were 10 American sailors and marines who secretly gathered below deck on the USS Warren, in the midst of war, to sign a petition reporting the misconduct of their commanding officer to his bosses.

They risked being branded traitors to demand that their leaders do the right thing. What could be more American?

Today, this heritage is threatened by the hyper-partisan polarization that is infecting almost every public issue. Broad bipartisan support for protected whistleblowing is essential to preserve this American tradition, but too often that support is undermined by those who applaud lawbreakers.

There is a world of difference between illegal leaking and protected whistleblowing.

The Continental Congress decided that what those sailors and marines did on the USS Warren was worthy of protection rather than punishment. Yes, they went outside the chain of command, but they went to a higher authority, petitioning the Congress itself rather than leaking. The July 30, 1778 resolution reads:

Resolved, That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge. (Emphasis added).

In the nearly two-and-a-half centuries since the actions of those patriots were ratified with the first whistleblower law, we have developed a complex maze of legal protections and exceptions. It is vital that those seeking to blow the whistle today understand what is protected, what is not protected—and why.  Expert guidance can be crucial, which is why we are working together through Empower Oversight to help those with inside knowledge of wrongdoing report it to the proper authorities and help Americans hold those authorities accountable for doing something about it.

Advocates will gather again this year as yet another Presidential administration fails to hold a Rose Garden ceremony to celebrate whistleblowers. The sacrifices of public servants trying to uncover corruption at the heart of the government are worthy of celebration, but would-be whistleblowers need to educate themselves and seek help to act in a way that minimizes the pain and maximizes the protection while telling the truth and making a real difference.

The pendulum swings between extremes in the struggle to balance legitimate government needs to control certain information with legitimate disclosures of wrongdoing. The secrecy rationalized in the name of Cold War security eventually yielded, post-Watergate, to the peak of bipartisanship in whistleblowing and transparency in the late 1970s. But the Pentagon Papers and Watergate paradigm faded by the 1990s and the lawfulness of disclosures began to rise in prominence. The September 11^th attacks put the thumb back on the scale for national security concerns, as in the Cold War.

Although journalists tout their “right to know,” the First Amendment provides little solace for sources who find themselves on the run or behind bars when they cross the line. Federal statutes criminalize disclosures like those of Daniel Ellsberg, and modern bureaucracies fight expertly to hide information from Congress like the report of Frank Spinney, praised as “the conscience of the Pentagon” by Senator Charles Grassley. If you’re thinking of blowing the whistle, it’s critical to know the difference between Edward Snowden and Dr. Fred Whitehurst.

Cheering illegal leaks as if they were protected whistleblowing weakens public support for whistleblower protections. And it does no good for those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, like Daniel Hale, who was sentenced on Tuesday to 45 months in prison. Applause are of little help to those stuck in a cell.

Whistleblower success stories are too few and too far between. Even when a disclosure is dead on target, the whistleblower often suffers most in the process. The brutal truth is that whistleblowers need to understand that no one can protect them better than themselves. Whistleblowers and their advocates must armor up, study the rules, ask for guidance, and respect the rule of law. Know the information battlespace before you step on the game board. Find like-minded and trustworthy friends to support you for the long haul.

American patriots don’t simply cheer the homeland, right or wrong. They band together to improve it, just as those 10 sailors and marines did in 1777 by reporting their commanding officer to his boss. Oversight of the bureaucracy by the people themselves, exercising sovereign authority through their representatives in Congress assembled—that’s the American way.

Dan Meyer serves on the Whistleblower Advisory Panel for Empower Oversight. He is Managing Partner of Tully Rinckey PLLC’s Washington, D.C. office and a subject-matter expert on whistleblowing in the Intelligence Community (IC) who previously served as the IC Inspector General’s Executive Director for Whistleblowing & Source Protection.

Jason Foster is the Founder and President of Empower Oversight and formerly Chief Investigative Counsel to Senator Charles Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The post Celebrate Whistleblowing—Not Leaking appeared first on Empower Oversight.